Monthly Archives: April 2007

Twitter

OK, I heard about twitter yonks and yonks ago – Alan started using it, then so too did Mike.

Then Mike published a list of texts he’d sent to Twitter last night whilst waiting for a date, and that pushed me back into investigating it this morning when I should have been getting ready to go out. (It’s so often been the source of me being horribly late… “Oh, I’ll just check my e-mail. And Cix. And usenet. And the blogs I follow, and the websites I click on every day. Ooh, that looks interesting…”)

So, Twitter is a quick thing, you tell it a one line post and it puts it on its own website, and makes it available for you to put on other websites. You can update it on the internet and by sending it a text message and through an IM client, although only a set of services I don’t use, like AIM.

So, it’s a bit like a mini-blog. Quick to update, but not so much space for wittering. A bit like the “status” bit of Facebook, but possible to incorporate it in other sites in a very Web 2.0 way.

Two further things occurred since I set it up this afternoon. What if I gave my Sat Nav program the Twitter SMS number? Navicore has a “beacon” function that texts your lat and long periodically to an SMS number of your choosing. I haven’t yet found a use for that, but when I was off round France for a long time, it would have been cool to send a regular series of co-ordinates to somewhere central to record them, and then plot them on a map on something like Google Earth.

Then I wondered about political uses for Twitter. It would be interesting to have people in the media eye to use it. “Ming Campbell is going into PMQs” for example. Or even “I’m in Full Council. This is taking ages!”

Both of those uses open up the chance for people whose interests are not terribly well aligned with yours to use your activity against you. Or stalk you. Is that a risk worth taking?

Poisson d’Avril

OK, so I twigged that Blair wasn’t really going to tread the boards, and that there weren’t really astronauts playing Quidditch.  Neither Iain Dale nor Lord Owen are really going to stand for Mayor of London.

But Troubled Diva reading out extracts from his blog book on Woman’s Hour?  Yup, swallowed that one hook line and sinker.

Even the increasingly silly parts of it.  No trouble believing that R4 wonk thinks TD is a woman.  No trouble believing he’d go with it.  No trouble thinking he’d make a recording trying to sound less butch.

Dear me.  I never was good at anagrams.

The numbers game

Canvassing is a numbers game.  Whilst standing at unanswered doors yesterday evening, I was multiplying fractions.

About one in ten people are in, or answer the door when knocked.

Only half of the people of that inner city ward register to vote.

Only one in five actually votes in local elections.

Of those that vote in that area, half voted Lib Dem at the last election.

That’s 1/10 * 1/2 * 1/5 * 1/2  = 1/200 chance that any given door I knock on will have someone behind it who will tell me they will vote Lib Dem.

I have to knock on 200 doors to find someone who will vote for us.  And if I do, that means we are winning.

So why do we it? Because one in ten of those one in two hundred people might join the Lib Dems if asked.  And one in ten of those might help out and deliver leaflets.  And who knows, one in ten of those might want to become a Lib Dem councillor.

That gets us to 1/200,000.

There are only 280,000 people in Nottingham.  We’re clearly screwed.  Or I can’t do maths.

Blair to tread boards

Tony Blair’s post-political career is to be theatre, the Observer reports today.

He’ll be appearing in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as the Reverend John Hale.

Which is the character I played when we did The Crucible at school in 1992.

I spent most of the time of my German exchange (when not playing Civ on my exchange mate’s computer.) I can remember the play, and some of the other people who were in it.

I can remember one strange rehearsal of one of the acts, in which Hale is supposed to ask a married couple to recite the ten commandments and the husband forgets Thou shalt not commit adultery. In the rehearsal, I forgot my lines, and missed out the question. Which made the act go a little quicker than planned and skipped rather a lot of important material.

I can’t now remember any of my lines – or indeed any of the lines from the other shows I’ve been in (there’s a list here). But I can remember the name of my German exchange partner. Googling his name, it looks like he’s just published his PhD. I can’t remember his return visit at all, but there are several things from my stay in Nuremberg that stay with me. In my first hour in Germany, after my first plane trip, with my ears hurting like hell and a headache, it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to flush the toilet and how to turn the tap on to wash my hands. It was one of those lift and turn mixer taps. I can’t remember why the loo puzzled me, but I can remember it had one of those strange platforms.

The other strong memory is of a dinner we had one night where they gave me grated cheese and raw meat and pickles, and we took it in turns to load a mini-saucepan and then put it under a mini electric grill on the table to cook/melt.

I haven’t been in Germany for years now, and my language skills are failing fast. Must go back! But in my mental, unbooked, holiday plans for this year, it looks like Geneva and Brussels are on the list, and possibly Normandy again. Geneva to visit friends variously in the Alps and Geneva itself; Brussels to show P the Atomium and the European Parliament, and the chocolate, and the Tintin murals and and and…, and as an excuse to use the Eurostar once the St Pancras terminal opens this autumn.